


it comes and goes (in waves)

by Nielrian



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-15 03:45:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19603387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nielrian/pseuds/Nielrian
Summary: Michael doesn’t remember the first time he saw Alex Manes.





	it comes and goes (in waves)

**Author's Note:**

> This began as a ficlet that took place between s1e9 and s1e10, but took me too long to finish. Eventually it grew and changed and became this. 
> 
> Shoutouts and kudos to [notsodarling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notsodarling/pseuds/notsodarling) for all the cheerleading and commiseration and [Shenanigans](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shenanigans/pseuds/Shenanigans) for being my forced beta (and for without whom this fic would have a VERY different ending). Thank you.
> 
> NOTE: Fair warning, this story directly addresses some pretty severe child abuse, so please be careful. The character death referenced in the tags is Max's death at the end of s1e13.

It begins like this.

Michael doesn’t remember the first time he saw Alex Manes. 

It seems like he should. In fiction it would be something significant. A focal point. A narrative beat. Eyes would meet and music would swell and the grey-toned world would turn glorious technicolor. At least that’s certainly how it seemed to work in the movies.

And for Max. 

Max can, and will, if pressed, recount the exact moment he first saw Liz Ortecho. He evidently remembers it with such crystalline clarity that he can accurately recall the duck appliqué on her overalls and the color of the ribbon she wore in her hair when first he laid eyes on her.

It’s romantic in an over-the-top way that all movies tell him things should be.

But for someone whose life has affected Michael’s as much as Alex’s ultimately has, reality can’t seem to help but fall hopelessly short for them. Reality is that Michael’s life isn’t a movie, and he has no memory of the first time he met Alex. Reality is that Michael, by twelve, had bounced between foster and group homes more times than he cares to count. He arrived at each new placement, head down and trash bag in hand, with one goal: get back to Isobel and Max. By any means necessary.

His case workers at the group home never seemed to realize that he can read upside down. 

_Failure to thrive. Difficulty forming and maintaining relationships. Anger issues. Lack of bonding with parental figures. Difficulty with authority._

It’s a hard habit to break. He never did excel at making friends.

By the time their thirteenth birthday rolled around Michael was more or less accustomed to his lot in life, and he spent his time in fosters counting down the days until he aged out of the system. Once his final, ultimately disastrous placement got him back to Roswell, to Max and Isobel, they’d kept each other close and he’d settled into what became his new normal. Keep your head down. Never be extraordinary. Don’t stand out. And above all else? Never reveal their secret. No matter what.

'The Evans Twins' became 'The Evans Twins And Guerin'. Nobody else got close. Nobody could. Those were the rules. With one Liz-shaped exception, it seemed.

Max had been quietly obsessed with Liz Ortecho since even before Michael returned to Roswell, and for her Max clearly wanted to be extraordinary. Liz and Alex Manes had been friends since elementary school. It had been difficult to casually orbit Liz without simultaneously orbiting Alex and Maria DeLuca, too, along with Liz’s douchebag boyfriend Valenti (much to Max’s evident consternation). So Michael has mostly peripheral memories of Alex from junior high, faded and hazy with the distance of time, with his skater hair and scuffed-up knees and deep brown eyes. 

It wasn’t until high school that Max’s infatuation and desire to be close to Liz meant that Alex entered Michael’s awareness in a real way.

He remembers scamming a burger off of Max at the Crashdown while Alex and DeLuca did their homework in the corner booth across the room and shared a shake. He remembers sitting on the cement steps behind the school during lunch period and watching Alex and a few other skater kids do kickflips in the corner of the recently re-paved student parking lot. He remembers once in AP Chem overhearing Tanner Dalton call Alex _that fucking faggot_ to his friends. He remembers how they’d all laughed. He remembers in junior year when two weeks into spring semester Alex showed up to school with his once-shaggy hair cut short. He’d passed him at his locker as he bowed his head indulgently to let Liz run her fingers through it. He remembers catching a glimpse of a mottling black and purple bruise the size of a grapefruit on Alex’s back as he hastily changed clothes in the far corner of the locker room. He remembers thinking _boot_. He remembers passing the music room on his way to his truck and seeing Alex through the open door, black painted fingernails moving over the frets of a guitar, eyes closed, his low voice murmuring accompaniment. It was quiet, something mumbled and entirely non-performative, for no one’s pleasure but his own. The guitar was slightly out of tune. It hadn’t seemed to bother him. 

Maybe he doesn’t have that one focal memory, that crucial point of initial contact. Maybe the world didn’t stop spinning and no sparks flew and the first words they exchanged were long lost to time. Maybe his life’s not a movie and maybe they’re not soulmates. Maybe he can’t remember the moment Alex Manes came into his life. But in a decade of moments there has yet to be a time when his heart didn’t beat just a little bit faster for him.

And he figures maybe that’s enough.

\------

It begins like this.

Michael finds the Manes house with little trouble. 

And just like Alex said there is a large wooden shed tucked into the sparse treeline at the back of the property. It’s bigger than Michael was expecting, and looks handmade, not like one of the generic aluminum or plastic ones you can buy at the farm supply store. It’s got a well-constructed metal roof and even full sized glass-paned windows. 

He doesn’t enter that first time, just peers through the window and hastily scopes the structure out. The last thing he needs is to get picked up by the cops for casing the place. It’s full of woodworking tools and fishing equipment. Several bicycles hang in the rafters. Deer antlers cover the walls. There’s a line of tiny clay pots on the window sills, empty and forgotten but for some dry, crumbling weeds.

The door swings a few inches open when he gives it a push - no lock. Not many people willing to steal from an Air Force family, he supposes. 

It’s tempting. The nights _are_ cold and his back hurts from spending so many nights sleeping in the unyielding bed of his truck or propped half-upright across the bench seat, but he’s wary of staying while he can still avoid it. It’s not that he thinks Alex made the offer insincerely or just out of pity for the poor homeless kid sleeping rough. Rather, Michael doesn’t want to overstay his hypothetical welcome. It seems best to keep it in his back pocket unless he really needs a place to go. He’d made it through the winter months with luck and proper planning. They’d had an unseasonably warm few months, and on the nights when it got too cold to stand he’d crash on the floor of Max’s room. But there are only so many sleepovers you can have before parents start to get wise, and Michael wants to avoid getting sent back to the group home at all costs. He’d rather freeze. 

When the heater in his Chevy goes out Michael has to make a choice. The part is a hundred and fifty bucks that he can’t afford, though Sanders promises to keep an eye out for a salvageable one at the yard. Without it the desert nights become nearly unbearable as a delayed cold snap sweeps the state. His options quickly become limited. 

He goes to the shed. 

As before, it’s quiet and empty when he lets himself inside. And blessedly warm, buffered from the worst of the wind by the surrounding trees. That first night he keeps the lights off, drapes himself in the thin blanket he finds at the end of the futon, and dozes fitfully in the corner until dawn, when he removes any trace of himself and quickly retreats again. The next night he returns. Everything is just as he left it that morning, save for one thing. At the end of the couch is stacked a thick, slightly scratchy blanket, folded into a neat rectangle, and on top, a lumpy pillow in a light brown pillowcase.

By the end of May Michael’s staying in the shed more nights than he’s not. He has his routine down pat. At night after dusk he lets himself in, sets up his sleeping bag and utilizes the spare blanket to make himself a passably comfortable bed. He does his homework by lamplight and works on his calculations when his mind buzzes too loud for him to sleep. When morning comes he rolls up his sleeping bag, packs up his things and heads back to his truck. 

A few weeks after it goes out Sanders comes through with the part for the Chevy and even walks him through how to do the repair. On top of that he lets Michael pay him in trade by spending his weekends doing oil changes for the townies who come through the yard. It’s messy, monotonous work, but Michael doesn’t mind. He’s just biding his time until graduation comes.

Despite the fix Michael doesn’t stop staying in the shed. It’s nice to be warm every night. It’s nice to have a quiet place to work on his projects. It’s nice to be able to sleep through the night without running his engine every few hours to warm himself. It’s nice not to have to worry about the cops picking him up for loitering.

He’s been spending his nights there for almost a month before Alex shows up. He quickly moves to leave, to abdicate to Alex’s potentially greater need, but he’s just as quickly reassured. 

"It's good that you've been staying here. It gets cold at night," Alex says, and there's something there, something in the way he says it that stirs something in Michael, but Alex presses on, swings a black guitar case down from his shoulder.

“It’s my brother’s,” he says, and he hands Michael the case. "I don't know, I thought maybe you'd use it."

Michael doesn’t know what this is. In his experience a lunch is never free and you never get something for nothing. But Alex, again, is quick to reassure him. 

“People don’t always have an agenda. They can just be nice to each other, for no reason, sometimes.”

Unlikely. 

He wonders what it would be like to live in a world like that, where everyone took care of each other the way they were supposed to, where no one slipped through the cracks and no one got taken advantage of. But Alex’s eyes are clear, and as Michael searches them he feels no lie. 

The music helps quiet him, he explains. He can’t seem to help _but_ explain. Once he starts he just wants to keep talking, wants for some wild, desperate reason for Alex to understand what this means to him. As not just an act of kindness, but an act of salvation. And Alex doesn’t look at him like he’s some lost boy, like he pities or patronizes him. His eyes are soft, no harsh edge of judgment or distaste to be found. He’s nodding like he understands. He thinks of the bruises on Alex’s back, the first aid kit he'd found under the futon, recently used. Maybe he does. 

“Thank you,” he says, and he can’t remember ever meaning the words more.

“You’re welcome,” is the whispered response, and as their eyes meet - hold - something changes, some missing element seems to click into place. For an instant Alex’s gaze flicks down. He tilts his head and Michael knows _he’s going to kiss me._

For a dizzying moment his breath catches and the bottom of his stomach drops out. He can’t help it, he turns away. Clutches the neck of the guitar. Forces the air out of his lungs. 

He’s not sure what he expects to happen. For Alex to say something? To, what, force him? To make Michael leave? Instead, and to his surprise, Alex does nothing, merely leans away again as Michael’s fingers start to move mindlessly over the strings. 

Michael keeps his head down, doesn’t want to see the look on Alex’s face. He can hardly stand the thought of seeing anger written there, finds the thought of disappointment even more intolerable.

He strums the guitar for a few uninterrupted minutes, until the melody runs away from him and he falters - stops - feels the last wavering note humming through the wooden frame.

When he manages to pull his eyes up off the floor he sees that Alex is watching him, his hands with their chipped-paint fingernails folded neatly in his lap. There’s a strange look on his face, an expression that Michael can’t quite pin down.

“Play another one?” he asks, voice low. Michael’s fingers move without conscious knowledge, and Alex scoots himself further up onto the futon, propping himself against the back. His eyes drop closed, his head tips back.

Michael plucks out a few chords; meandering at first, then coming together into a semi-familiar riff; Fleetwood Mac’s _Never Going Back Again_ , a local favorite on the one station the Chevy’s ancient radio manages to pick up clearly, and one his fingers know well.

His heart at last begins to slow its frantic rock and roll rhythm and he lets the oncoming sense of calm wash over him. If for no other reason than this, the simple realization that he can create his own calm, manufacture serenity with music, his time with his most recent religiously fanatical foster failure would have been worth it. The cost was high, but the knowledge was worth the pain.

Michael has a passable singing voice. He can, at the very least, carry a tune, but it’s nothing to write home about and certainly nothing he’s put any effort into improving or maintaining. He much prefers to let his fingers and the instrument do the work and to let the music carry him.

So it catches him slightly off guard when the quiet hum from his periphery forms itself into words. Alex, eyes still closed, softly sings along to the unsteady melody, sotto voce. He has a nice voice, nicer still when he starts to vocalize in earnest. It’s smooth and even, slightly higher than his speaking voice with just a hint of rasp. 

Michael finds the corners of his mouth tugging into a smile. He picks up the harmony, as clunky as it might feel at first, and watches Alex’s foot move in time to the music. He plays the song through, and as he completes the last flourish he looks up to find his smile mirrored on Alex’s face.

“You play really well,” he says, and knocks his foot into Michael’s knee. Michael scoffs. 

“Hardly. I’m out of practice.” Michael plucks at the strings absently.

“Well, hang onto the guitar for now. Keep practicing. Maybe you can start a band.” For all of the levity in his voice Michael can tell there’s something more there. He bends to carefully put the guitar back in its case, mindful of the fact that, despite the generousness of the offer, it does not belong to him.

“Is that what you want to do?” Michael asks, forces himself to keep his tone casual and not betray his interest.

Alex exhales, a hum on his lips. He pulls his knees to his chest and rests his forearms across them. He looks small, somehow. Michael has never seen him look small before. He’s quiet for a long moment. 

“I don’t know,” he says, and his eyes are down, unfocused. “Maybe. I guess so. I like singing. I like playing music.” The fingers of one hand start tugging at the loose threads at the knee of his torn jeans. “We talked about college. I’m not a genius like Liz. Or you. But my grades were pretty okay.” 

His lips tug into something like a smile that falls just as quickly as it had risen. 

“But my dad expects me to follow him and my brothers into the service.” 

The idea of Alex - kind, creative, rebellious Alex - buttoning up to carry a weapon into a war zone fits like a poorly-made shirt and Michael can’t help but balk, his gut clenching unpleasantly. 

Alex sighs and tucks his face down into his folded arms. His voice comes out muffled.

“Sometimes I just want to get the hell out of this town. Pack my shit and head to the Greyhound station and be done with this place. Go to L.A. or New York and just… start over where nobody knows me. Where my - where no one could find me.”

“Yeah, I get that.” 

Alex’s head tips up. “Yeah?”

“I mean, sometimes when I’m out there,” he jerks his head toward the door. “I just look up at the stars and wish I was... somewhere else.” 

Michael doesn’t talk about these things. He’s never told Max or Isobel about what he does out at the Foster ranch. He doesn’t think it’s something they would understand. They’re happy in this town, on this _planet_. Happy not knowing where they came from or where they belong. 

But Alex’s eyes are soft and understanding, searching his own, and it makes Michael feel reckless; like the first pebble that starts a rockslide, slightly out of control. There’s something about Alex that seems to bring his guard down and he has to check himself, hard, before he says too much.

Alex must sense his discomfiture, somehow, and he looks away, clears his throat. 

“Anyway,” he says, and pushes himself up from the couch, backpedals quickly to the door. “I’ll leave you to it. Um. Have a good night.”

“‘Night.”

As he leaves Michael is surprised to feel the nagging ache in his chest of disappointment.

\------

It begins like this.

Kissing Alex, he finds, is not altogether different from kissing anyone else. At first his body is tense and unyielding, wound tight with surprise, but once Alex gets over his initial shock Michael finds that he’s warm and accommodating with a contagious enthusiasm that is in no way diminished by his inexperience. 

His mouth is as plush and soft as any girl Michael has ever kissed, his tongue clever and sweet as it meets his own. When Michael bites down on his lower lip he makes a tiny noise of surprised pleasure and, yeah, that’s something he can work with. 

When they finally pull apart, their mouths equally swollen and their hair and clothes a rumpled mess, Alex’s dark eyes are blown wide, an attractive flush staining his cheeks. 

Michael can feel his arousal building, washing through him, flooding like high tide. It feels fast, too fast, and at the same time feels like he’s somehow been waiting forever, an eternity, for this. Alex’s fingers clutched in his sweatshirt tell a similar story. He lets his hands trail up Alex’s arms and closes his fingers around Alex’s where they’re tangled on his chest. 

Alex’s breath is coming in faltering fits and starts. His tongue darts out to taste his bottom lip and Michael can’t help it, he pushes back in. His aim is slightly off and his lips miss their mark, though, landing off-center on the corner of Alex’s mouth. It makes Alex laugh, a warm breath that tickles Michael’s cheek and he wants nothing more than to hear it again again again. 

Voices from beyond the tacky velvet curtain pull them both back, and Alex untangles himself to move away, sticking his head through the gap in the curtain.

“Shit,” he says, turning to Michael again. “I have to - ” He gestures to the booth on the other side of the curtain.

“Yeah, of course,” Michael says, and the idea of Alex going back out there, of taking those tourist's money, chatting with them with his kiss-swollen lips and disheveled hair, makes the heat rise in his face. 

Alex clears his throat. “Listen, I have to… I have to be here until 6:00. After that I can… we can…” he trails off, eyes to the floor, flush spreading down his neck. 

Michael feels a smile tug at his lips. He bends to pick up Alex’s hat from the ground and presses it into Alex’s hands as he moves to the exit, fingers brushing soft, deliberate.

“You know where to find me.”

***

The moment Alex is back in his arms Michael knows this is different. He's hooked up with girls before, girls who didn't mind slumming it behind the bleachers or making out half-drunk on the tailgate of his truck outside some party. 

He enjoys sex, but it's not something he's put too much thought into. The kind of girls he's hooked up with know what they want and know how to get it. It's easy. It's efficient. It's fun. It doesn't mean anything. 

This is not that. 

Alex’s inexperience is evident, but this is new ground for Michael too, and he can’t deny the surge of desire he feels getting to watch the heat slowly ignite in Alex's eyes. 

Michael’s shirt comes off and Alex’s fingers alight on his shoulders, flitting away almost as quickly. His touch is tentative, fleeting and unsure, as though he’s expecting Michael to slap his hands away at any moment.

“Not with someone I’ve liked as much as I like you,” he tells him, and it’s nothing but the truth. He puts a hand on Alex’s chest, feels the swift, strong beat of his heart beneath his palm. Alex’s face changes, his dark eyes wide as they move over Michael’s face, measurement and wonder and something else Michael doesn't dare name.

His hand comes up to cover Michael’s, unsteady fingers squeezing his slightly damp palm.

And so Michael waits, holds himself deliberately still. It’s fast. It’s _new_ . It’s a lot. And some intrinsic part of him needs to make sure it’s not too much. He lets Alex close the distance between them, swaying nearer with every breath like they’re oppositely charged. His fingers curl around either side of Michael’s neck and he pulls Michael to him gently, _so_ gently.

His lips are soft and warm as they meet, and Michael doesn’t know if a kiss has ever felt like this. Like he never wants to stop, like he could do nothing but this for the rest of the day, for the rest of his _life_ , and he’d still ask whatever alien god he met on the other side for just one more minute of it. 

He allows himself to feel and appreciate every touch as if it were the first time, as Alex must be feeling it now. The soft skin of Alex’s neck under his palm, the weight of Alex’s fingers through his hair, the slick slide of his tongue.

He tugs at the hem of Alex’s t-shirt, hands desperate to touch, and Alex lifts his arms with no hesitation. When it comes off, his eyes are bright, a half-shy smile tugging his kiss-swollen mouth. 

Michael _wants_.

He wants to touch him, to take him apart with lips and teeth and gentle hands. He wants to lie down next to him and wrap himself around him, surround him, and never let him leave. More than anything, though, he wants to do everything he can to keep that light in his eyes. 

He feels his lips curve into a smile and he takes Alex’s face in his hands again, presses their lips together, harder this time. Alex makes a sound into his mouth that has Michael’s toes curling in his boots. 

Alex’s touch is almost cool against his sides, fingers digging into the muscles of his back. He touches him with sure hands, the hesitancy of minutes ago diminished now that he’s been reassured that Michael isn’t going to reject his touch.

For a few long, enjoyable minutes it’s just that. Warm lips and the slick press of tongues, wandering hands exploring the curves of backs and shoulders. When Alex pulls away to drag in an uneven breath, Michael sets his mouth to the soft skin of his throat, feels his pulse beat steadily, hotly against his lips.

Alex’s head tips to the side to allow this; his hands stop their restless petting as though he’s forgotten their intent, and this, too, is a new and fantastic discovery. 

He’s not sure which of them makes the first move toward the futon, but when he feels the edge of it press against his calf he sits and tugs Alex down next to him, two fingers of one hand hooked through a belt loop. 

With enough room between them to breathe Michael can see that his dark eyes are blown wide with arousal, only a tiny ring of brown visible. He bends to untie his boots with one hand, plucking at the stubborn double knots. After a moment Alex does the same, toeing one sneaker off and then the other. A pause, and then he leans over and pulls his socks off, too, tucking them each into their matching shoe. A helpless smile curls Michael’s lips.

He turns, angles toward him and their knees touch. Alex reaches for him and Michael leans into the press of his hand as though drawn to him by gravitational force. Alex’s fingers thread through his hair and his grip draws Michael close, closer, until they’re sharing breath again.

Michael eases himself near and wraps an arm around Alex’s slim waist, presses their lips together. He smooths his palm up and down his back, feels the goose flesh rise in its wake. 

Alex’s hand comes up, the backs of his knuckles drag against Michael’s stomach, and his palm comes to rest on his sternum. Michael leans into it, and there’s a solid weight behind it. Michael instinctually pushes back, equal and opposite like Newton’s third. When the pressure doesn’t relent, but in fact increases, it takes a long moment for Michael to cotton on to what Alex is asking. 

“Is it - ” Alex starts, and his palm is like a brand on his chest.

Michael puts his hand on top of Alex’s, reinforces the pressure there. “Yeah. Yes. It’s good. It’s all good.”

He drops his hand and allows Alex to push him backwards onto the couch. Alex clambers after him and they spend a few moments trying to arrange themselves in the relatively small space. They find humor in the collision of knees and elbows, and Alex’s bright laugh makes something warm pool in the pit of his stomach. He can’t remember ever having laughed during a hookup before.

He ends up on his side, bracketed by the elevated futon mattress at his back and Alex pressed to his chest. The futon isn’t overly spacious or comfortable, but Michael finds that with Alex warm and solid against him he can’t muster a single complaint. They speak in the language of hands and lips, the slick slide of tongues and the hot press of palms. With each dizzying minute the residual tension in Alex seems to fade, until they’re pressed chest to knee and Alex is loose-limbed and pliant, relaxed against him. Arousal swells in his gut, hot and dark, and his jeans have become painfully tight. Every sensation feels heightened somehow, and it builds until even the drag of Alex’s fingers down his spine leaves him panting into the smooth skin of his throat. They’re pressed so tightly together that when Michael rocks closer he feels where his belt buckle digs into Alex’s hip, and the sharp edges must be uncomfortable, though Alex makes no move to pull away. 

He wiggles a hand down between them and works the buckle free of itself; the metal on metal clank seems loud against the backdrop of their breathing. With their foreheads pressed close he sees Alex’s eyes, downcast, tracking his hand. He stops, belt half out of its loops.

“Is it…? I don’t have to - ” 

Alex’s chin tips up. “No, yeah. It’s okay. It’s - ” 

He cuts himself off, curls his hand around the back of Michael’s neck, pulls him close again, his lips catching Michael’s, biting, insistent.

Michael pulls the belt free and tosses it to the end of the couch, hears it clatter loudly on the wooden floorboards. He wraps his arm around Alex; palms his shoulders, his back, gets his hand on his ass, his thigh, and coaxes his leg up and over his own. His thigh is pressed tight between Alex’s and Michael can feel the swell of his arousal hard against him. 

Alex makes a choked sound into his mouth and grinds his hips down like he can’t help himself, his hand clenching almost painfully in Michael’s hair. The friction, even through layers of denim, feels amazing, and for a time Michael’s mind goes blissfully quiet, the world condenses, and anything outside of the circle of their arms ceases to matter. Alex’s hand fisting in his curls and his tongue in Alex’s mouth and Alex’s weight half on him and Alex’s growing heat against him and Alex Alex _Alex_ -

His hands clutch at Alex’s hips; pulling, pushing, guiding, and it’s good, so good, and he’s so hard it hurts but he doesn’t care, he just wants more, wants everything, anything Alex is willing to give. He twists, plants his hand next to Alex’s head, and rolls, leveraging some of his weight to press Alex down onto his back. 

Alex draws in a sharp breath and his nails dig sharp crescents into Michael’s shoulder. Michael holds himself still, braced above him. He looks for signs of discomfort in the long lines of Alex’s body, for any signal his actions are unwanted, but Alex’s eyes are still dark and calm, and his arms around Michael’s back pull him close.

Burying his face against the smooth skin of Alex’s neck, he gets a leg over one of Alex’s and settles in, thoroughly enjoying the way Alex’s ragged breath ghosts pasts his ear on every exhale.

Alex shifts beneath him, restless, and Michael indulges momentarily in the solid friction against Alex’s hip and the jolts of pleasure that move up his spine like a current. He gets a hand on the button of Alex’s jeans and spends an agonizing few seconds trying to thumb the button through the hole without looking. When he finally gets a hand down his pants Alex lets out a groan so filthy that it makes Michael a little light headed.

He’s never done this before with a boy.

He’s always had a thing for long legs and pretty eyes and great asses, no matter who they’re attached to, and he’s sort of assumed that human sexuality is for, well, humans. He’s never really felt the need to align with them. He likes what he likes. He likes girls. And he likes Alex.

So maybe he’s never done this part with another boy, but he knows what gets _him_ off, and logic dictates the basic mechanics must be the same.

Alex responds beautifully, arching up into his palm with urgent little jerks of his hips. God, but he’s gorgeous like this, all flushed skin and taught muscles and quiet moans. Michael gets lost watching pleasure transform his face with each change in motion or pressure. He spits in his hand to ease the way and that, too, changes the way Alex reacts. 

When he comes Michael gets to watch his mouth drop open on a breathless gasp, gets to watch his back arch and feel his toes curl; gets to see his blown-dark eyes open - focus - brighten.

Alex maneuvers them, still loose-limbed, and pushes Michael’s hand out of the way to make room for his own between them. The first touch of Alex’s calloused fingers around him make his eyes roll back in his head. It’s good, it’s _so good_ he doesn’t want it to end. He’s dimly aware of the frantic noises he’s making into the curve of Alex’s neck, but he’s too far gone to care if he’s embarrassing himself. His touch is sure and strong and _just right_ and he’d be ashamed at how little time it takes to bring him off if he had enough functioning brain cells for coherent thought. 

He pants his relief into Alex’s neck as fingers sift rhythmically through his hair and if there’s ever been a moment in his life closer to bliss he doesn’t remember it.

Their breathing slows and evens but by some joint, unspoken consensus they don’t make to move apart. For a long few minutes they share the wonderful discomfort of warm, sticky closeness, bathed in the fading afternoon sunlight.

Alex smells like sex and sweat and the tangy sharpness of hair product. His skin is smooth and flushed, chest still heaving beneath his palm. His throat vibrates under Michael’s lips - he’s humming, just barely, vocal chords trembling. 

Michael rolls to his side, reluctantly lifts his head. Alex smiles at him, a youthful, reckless thing.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Michael replies, and he knows his smile reflects Alex’s, no mirror required.

He finds himself watching Alex with new eyes. He doesn’t want this afternoon to end, to burst the bubble of their little wooden sanctuary. Even as Alex cleans up, re-buttons his pants, slips back into his t-shirt, Michael is already thinking of when he’ll get to peel it off of him again. Tonight, maybe, if he’s lucky. 

It’s months away yet, but he feels the keen sting of anticipatory grief, of the reluctance to leave this behind come September. In his head he’s already calculating bus fares and gas prices and halfway point motel rooms. He doesn’t know where Alex will be come fall, but he can’t help the niggling swell of hope in his chest that it’s somewhere near.

“What’s got you thinking so hard? Everything… okay?” When Alex is concerned his forehead crinkles adorably.

Michael takes his face in his hands, presses his own forehead to that little crinkle. “Better than okay.”

When they kiss he feels Alex’s answering smile against his own.

\------

It ends like this.

It’s the worst pain Michael has ever felt. Worse than being beaten with a belt, worse than having a beer bottle shattered on his bare feet, worse than having his flesh seared with a heated cross.

After the third strike Michael loses count. The pain comes in waves so staggering in their intensity that he barely notices when the iron grip on his arm releases. His legs go out from under him and the floor jars his arm so badly when he falls that he tastes bile. His vision starts to swim dizzily and he squeezes his eyes shut to stop the spinning. He thinks he might pass out.

Alex is screaming.

Something heavy hits the floor near his face and when he manages to open his eyes he sees Jesse Manes dislodging Alex’s grip from his arm with a hard shove that sends Alex stumbling into the wooden dividing wall. 

The back of Alex’s head connects with one of the beams with a sickening _thud_ that shakes a pained cry from his throat. There’s blood on Alex’s face; _his_ blood, little droplets of it splattered on his cheek and chin like macabre constellations, and the sight of it turns Michael’s stomach to pure acid.

“You will _not_ disobey me,” Manes growls, and his hand is back on Alex’s throat. “You flaunt your perversions in my house. You shame this family, my name. Well, no more.” 

Alex chokes wetly, struggling to breathe. A strangled, terrible whimper rises from his throat. His black fingernails claw red streaks into his father’s hand and forearm as he tries to free himself. 

Manes’ free hand comes up to touch Alex’s face, the gentleness of it in absolute juxtaposition to the crushing grip on his neck.

“You see what you make me do,” he says, and he smears the blood, _Michael’s blood_ , across Alex’s pale, tear-stained cheek. “You bring this on yourself. Every time.”

Every muscle in Michael’s body seizes as he fights his natural instinct to just curl around his mangled hand and surrender. Alex’s feet start kicking frantically and he has to get up get up get up

_get up_

Manes takes half a step back and Michael knows with horrifying and intimate certainty what is about to happen. He raises his arm and strikes Alex across the face with the back of his closed fist, an inelegant blow, but hard - so hard that Alex staggers - falls - hits the wall with a hollow sounding _thud_ that shakes the entire structure. Michael can hear him gasping and coughing, pulling in huge lungfuls of lost breath. 

He does not get up. 

Michael manages to push himself to his knees, arm clutched to his chest, his body braced against the leg of the workbench. His blood is smeared in a messy arc on the floorboards.

Manes seems to consider Alex’s prone form for a long moment before he moves with purpose to the makeshift bed and picks up the pile of Michael’s remaining clothes. He turns, military precise, and regards Michael with cold, blue eyes; eyes so unlike Alex’s.

Michael has seen violence before, has lived it almost daily since the day he hatched out of the pod. He’s seen the truly horrible shit humans are capable of doing to one another. But something about this man’s eyes chills Michael through in a way he’s never experienced. How can a man enact such cruelty, step over his own bloodied child lying at his feet, and remain so terrifyingly calm?

“You,” Manes says, and he drops the discarded clothes in front of Michael. “Get off of my property.” His voice is still controlled and measured, each word clipped and sure. “If you ever come near here again there will be consequences. Do you understand?”

“Y-yes.” Michael manages to choke the word out between gasped breaths, his vision blurred by moisture.

He meets Alex’s terrified eyes, huge and dark, from across the small space. One of them is stained a gory red as blood runs freely from an ugly gash above his eyebrow. _It’s okay, he’s okay,_ his sluggish mind supplies, _head wounds just bleed a lot. He's okay he's okay he's okay_.

Manes takes a step forward and his legs block Michael’s view. “Yes?” he prompts, and the word hovers there expectantly.

Michael’s throat constricts. “Yes, sir.” 

“Good. Now get out.” 

Michael manages somehow to pick up the bundle of clothes and stand up, leaning heavily on the workbench, and as his vision swims he’s thankful he doesn’t pass out. He hesitates, bundle clutched to his chest.

Alex is curled to the wall. His throat is already turning a blotchy, awful red. As he tries to stand up, a drop of blood drips from his chin to the dusty floor. 

To run means leaving Alex, bruised and bloodied, alone and at the mercy of this man. Even with the flood of adrenaline helping to mute the sharp agony of his hand, Michael can barely stand. But the fear in Alex’s eyes sparks something gut-deep in Michael that keeps him rooted in place, unable to move, paralyzed by indecision. 

As he stands caught on the precipice between fight and flight he feels his well-honed control begin to slip, his vision blurring not from pain but from the effort it takes to keep his powers in check. 

Manes takes a step toward him and Michael can’t help it, he flinches, his head spinning at the sudden movement. 

“Go,” Alex urges, and his panicked voice comes out as barely a rasp. 

Michael goes. 

He stumbles, half blinded by tears, out the door and into the trees. The Chevy is parked out of sight on the street behind the Manes’ house, and he doubles back, pushing into a shambling run. His foot catches on something in his path, a rock or root maybe, and he stumbles, instinctively trying to catch himself. His arm jostles so badly that his vision goes dim at the edges and he has to stop, letting a thin sapling take the brunt of his weight. 

Michael can still hear Alex, his breath coming rough and pained, through the shed wall. 

“If every _bit_ of this mess isn’t cleaned up by the time I get back, you will regret it,” Manes says, his voice low and cold. “You can take this time to consider your future and the kind of man you want to be. We will be discussing this later.”

A long moment passes, punctuated only by Alex’s labored breathing, and Michael hears the change in footfall as Manes exits the shed and crosses the yard to the main house, the wooden door slamming in his wake.

He can hear Alex start to cry in earnest; hoarse, almost frantic sobs that come up from somewhere deep in his chest, and Michael has never wanted anything more in his life than to tear down the wall that separates them with his bare hands, to take Alex away from this place and that man and never look back. His whole body _aches_ with it. But the shed door is in full view of the back patio, and if he’s seen, well, he's in no shape to fight. And the alternative? Never reveal the secret. No matter what.

As the adrenaline starts to fade and the pain begins to consume him, Michael fears that he might be going into shock. He needs to stop the bleeding. He needs to numb the pain. He needs acetone. 

He turns, and with the sound of Alex’s sobs chasing him through the trees, he runs.

\------

It ends like this.

Michael hasn’t seen Alex in three years. 

So when he shows up on Foster’s homestead, on Michael’s makeshift doorstep, with his regulation haircut and his unfamiliar straight-backed posture, he feels like the earth has tilted sharply on its axis.

Alex is wearing civilian clothes, but Michael thinks he would be able to tell the difference years of military service has made from half a mile away. Something about his carriage, the way he holds his head, the set of his shoulders. 

He hadn’t looked this way the last time Michael had seen him, years ago, standing in his dusty, worn-down sneakers on this very spot. Head down, eyes averted, telling Michael he'd enlisted. The memory’s sharp edges have faded with time, but seeing Alex here, now, brings it all back to him in a dizzying rush that leaves him gripping the Airstream’s doorframe hard enough for the metal to bite sharply into his palm.

The weeks following the deaths of the three girls were a nightmarish blur. Max had insisted, despite everything, that they all attend school as usual in order to not draw any extra attention to themselves.

Liz Ortecho hadn't come back to school. 

They held an assembly. Grief counselors were brought in for the students. Pictures and flower arrangements sprung up at Kate Long and Jasmine Frederick’s lockers, colorful memorials that spilled out into the hallways like twisted cornucopias. 

Michael took to keeping a water bottle filled with nail polish remover with him, in too much pain to give a damn about discretion. Everyone was so consumed with the loss of their classmates that no one noticed that the homeless kid smelled perpetually like rubbing alcohol. Just like no one noticed that Alex Manes finished out the final days of the school year with a bruised face. 

Rosa Ortecho’s funeral was planned for that Friday, five days after the grim discovery of her burned-out car, and Max wasn’t going to make it. Michael had seen it in his red-rimmed, sunken eyes. He was going to take one look at Liz, destroyed and consumed by her grief, and he was going to break. He was going to tell her their secret, tell her anything to try and lessen the blow, and it would mean the end for all of them. It would mean death and dissection and dismemberment, and, only if they were lucky, in that order.

Isobel saw it, too, must have been able to feel it lancing through their bond. And so the decision was made. And on a Wednesday afternoon, two days before her sister’s funeral, Liz Ortecho packed up her car and left town before the sun touched the horizon line. It’s not something he’s proud of, but it’s something he maintains was necessary. 

Max was never the same after that. A light in him had dimmed, never to be rekindled, and the burden of that is something Michael carries willingly, as willingly as he bears Isobel’s weighted, pitying looks. Like Michael's a favored family dog, newly unpredictable.

They all agreed never to speak of it again, for everyone’s sake. So he’d gathered his secrets close to his chest and drowned them in acetone, tried to forget.

Michael saw Alex, really saw him, only once before graduation, when he’d come upon him in the newly emptied hallways, head down and focused, clearing stacks of notebooks and papers from his locker into a large black trash bag. Michael’s first reaction had been to go to him, to talk to him, touch him, if only to reassure himself that he was alright, that he was whole and intact and _there_. That something in his life had not been destroyed by that single, awful night.

The sight of Jesse Manes had stopped Michael in his tracks, fear and anger churning his guts in tandem. Manes stood at Alex’s shoulder, a looming, malevolent presence radiating unflinching authority. Alex had been in loose pants and a plain, high collared shirt, his normally well-kept hair falling limply into his eyes, his fingernails scrubbed clean. His piercings gone. His eye and cheek had been stained a deep purple black, and a line of neat stitches stood out over his brow.

Manes had dropped his hand on Alex’s shoulder with all the weight of a guillotine blade and marched him out of the building. He’d left behind nothing but an empty locker.

The rest of the summer had passed in an agonizing daze. His mangled hand healed slowly, steadily, but still twisted and wrong. He told Max he’d been jumped. He’d been mauled by a dog. He’d knocked out some racist trucker. All the while keeping his hand bound close to his chest. Max offered to heal it. He’d refused. And Max had let it go. 

Max had canceled his cross country trip. Michael had quietly mailed his declination letter to UNM.

And life went on without Rosa Ortecho.

Isobel, seemingly unharmed after her ordeal and with no more blackouts under their watchful eyes, threw herself headlong into every distraction that came her way. Max stopped coming around for target practice. Isobel attended bridge club with their mother. 

And Michael was alone. 

He'd spent more and more time at Sanders’, tried to stay out of town, away from prying eyes. He didn’t like how people stared at him. Besides, it's not like he had anywhere else to go. 

He’d gone by the UFO Emporium and been told with little enthusiasm by the pimply-faced sophomore manning the desk that Alex had quit his job with not so much as a by-your-leave to his boss. Three weeks later and Alex was gone, off to the Air Force under the shadow of his father and brothers, taking what felt like every piece of what was left of Michael with him. 

Their conversation, if it could be called that, had been brief. Just a handful of sentences carried between them on the dusty wind. And Alex had stood there, face still a sickly, bruised yellow, hands in fists in his hoodie’s pockets, and needed only an instant and a few words to tear the ground out from under him. And just as quickly as he'd come he’d turned and walked away, dust swirling in his wake.

And months dragged into years and time ground by with no word except what little delayed gossip made its way out to the auto yard, carried on the wagging tongues of knitting-circle ladies and overly friendly townies looking to score a discount by talking his ear off. 

He heard through the grapevine when Alex passed basic training, tech school, and was transferred from Lackland to Who-Knows-Where, USA. All he’d managed to find out was he was somewhere on the east coast.

He'd kept an ear to the ground at the Pony, too, made half-hearted conversation with patrons while fleecing them for booze money, and told himself he wasn’t fishing for information. He wasn’t. But those Air Force guys gossiped almost as bad as the old biddies. Alex was never among them. Wherever he took his leave, it wasn’t Roswell.

Once, only once, while his head had spun with acetone and his heart was whiskey-heavy, he’d leaned over the bar and asked Mimi DeLuca if Alex was ever coming home. She’d looked him up and down, those intelligent brown eyes of hers alight with some inner glow.

She’d simply said, “Oh, _baby_ ,” and patted his hand. And he’d begun to accept the fact that Alex wasn’t coming back. 

Until now.

Until the moment he shows up on what passes for Michael’s front stoop, with his civilian clothes and combat boots and pretty eyes. 

Michael misses the metal step and half-stumbles into the dirt, unwilling to look away for fear of waking himself from what must surely be a dream. Alex doesn’t speak, just squints at Michael through the wind-blown dust cloud. Michael takes him in. His hair is shorter than he’s ever seen it, close-cropped on the sides with perhaps an inch of length on top. He’s thinner but stronger, if the swell of his biceps under his sweatshirt is any indication; his jaw and cheekbones sharper than they’d been at seventeen. 

“It’s been a long time,” Michael manages, and somehow his voice is steady. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m on leave for a few days, thought I’d come through town.” Alex’s tone is all wrong, strained and uneven like he’s rehearsed lines from a script. Like Michael is a stranger.

They never were much good at talking when it mattered. The awkwardness frays at Michael’s temper and despite his best intentions to remain unaffected, he feels his frustration rising.

“And what brings you out to the sticks? Chafing under daddy’s thumb?”

It's cruel, he knows, and for the briefest of moments Alex’s face contorts before he schools his expression once more, and Michael feels his stomach twist in a sick twinge of almost-pleasure at having cracked the facade, even minutely.

Alex takes a breath deep enough that Michael can see his chest expand from ten paces. 

“I wanted to see you.”

The wind whips Michael’s hair into his face and he absently pushes it back; watches Alex track the movement. “Well, here I am.” 

Alex’s head stays fixed, but his eyes are moving, cataloging, surveying. Michael feels pinned in place, like the whole of him has been put on display for inspection and found wanting. 

“Alex. What do you want?” he says, and he lets his forced levity drop.

Alex flinches. Barely, but it’s there. He can see his throat working.

“I… I don’t know what to say, Guerin. I’ve spent three days trying to - I needed to - ” He takes an aborted step toward Michael. Just one, like he can’t help it. His fists clench and unclench at his sides.

The lines of his body read frustration. They read uncertainty. They read rigidity. But there’s something familiar in the way he shuffles his feet in those boots, the flex and release of his hands, the way the tilt of his head changed when challenged. He’s holding back. He’s holding back so hard he’s got himself tied in knots. Instinct colliding with discipline. Desire warring with uncertainty. It’s not that he doesn’t feel it, he does, Michael can tell. It’s that he’s out of his element. It’s Michael’s territory that he’s been surveying, and he seems to be stumbling over that first step. A step that he can’t - or won’t - take.

So Michael takes it for him. 

“You wanna come in?” he asks, and takes a shuffling, half step backwards, then another - tips his head toward the caravan.

It satisfies some deep-down part of him that Alex hesitates for only a moment before he’s following him across the yard, up the metal stairs and into the Airstream.

He watches Alex as he looks around the interior, taking in his surroundings. Alex's face betrays nothing, but he tries to see it as Alex must be seeing it. A barebones, slightly battered trailer, one with drawers that don’t close properly and one wonky cabinet that doesn’t hang straight. It’s full of boxes and piles of dirty, grease-stained clothes, random tools strewn about on the chipped countertops. 

It’s a work in progress. And it’s not meant to be permanent, anyway. Not if things go to plan.

Michael leans casually against the cabinets, cocks his head, and he watches Alex’s focus shift. He looks Michael up and down, takes in his threadbare t-shirt, soft from too many washes, his dirty, faded jeans. Their eyes meet, and it’s all it takes for Michael to know, really _know_ , that he wasn’t wrong. 

Alex feels it, too. 

It’s in the way he moves in the confined space, closer, always closer; and he doesn’t look away now. Alex pulls his sweatshirt off, lets it drop to the floor in a heap. 

Closer.

They’re nearly chest to chest and Michael can’t help it, he reaches for him, cups Alex’s jaw in his palm, strokes his cheek with his thumb. His breath, when he draws on it, comes shakily, and with effort. Alex leans into his touch and something in his chest seems to seize and loosen at the same time. Alex’s breath stutters and that little crinkle appears on his brow. His hand comes up and he takes Michael’s own hand in his, pulls it away from his face. 

Michael’s left hand. 

Belatedly he tries to pull it back, but Alex’s grip is firm. A sick swell of discomfort begins rising in his gut. 

Alex looks Michael in the eye, and Michael can see the color start to drain from his face. His gaze drops to their joined hands - Alex’s, calloused and slightly rough, but whole, and the mangled remains of Michael’s own. 

As a rule Michael doesn’t let anyone look at his hand. Not closely, anyway. It prompts too many questions. Questions he has no intention of answering truthfully. On occasions when people do ask he has a never ending rotation of bullshit answers, both benign and fantastical, ready for use as distraction. Bull riding injury, slammed in a car door, chupacabra attack, whatever he has to say so that he never has to acknowledge what really happened that day. 

There are two people in the world who know the truth, and one of them is standing in this room, looking at his ruined hand with suddenly wet eyes. He allows Alex to manipulate it, run calloused fingers over the ugly, raised lumps of badly healed bone beneath puckered skin. He's never let anyone touch it before, not like this, not with the kind of intent and intensity Alex shows, and he's surprised when the desire to pull it away again doesn't come. But Alex knows the truth of it, he _knows_ , and Michael realizes with a wave of relief there's no need to hide it from him.

"Does it hurt?" Alex asks, voice tight and small.

"No," Michael says, and they both know it's a lie. But instinct is hard to overcome, and his instinct has always been to protect. Alex is no exception.

He moves, curls his hand around the back of Alex's neck and kisses him. He loops an arm around his waist and pulls him close and it’s like a switch is flipped. Alex’s strong hands are soon everywhere at once, under his shirt, petting, pulling, fingernails digging into Michael’s back. His lips are warm and soft, and open eagerly under Michael’s own. They tear themselves apart, both move as one to rid themselves of shirts and pants, clumsy in their haste, and Michael reaches for him, pulls him to the bed. 

It’s nothing like the first time. In under a minute he has Alex naked in his bed - on his ugly, bargain shop sheets, rolling Michael onto his back. Alex straddles him, knees tight to his hips, and Michael palms his back, his thigh, his ass, pulls him down for a kiss. They move together, all hands and lips and smooth, hot skin. The hesitancy of their youth is gone, replaced by a confidence bolstered both by desperation and the weight of the years between them. 

Alex presses hard into Michael's lap. Into Michael's ear he breathes _please_ and there's something frantic there, simmering just beneath the surface. He braces himself on Michael's chest, looks him in the eye. 

"I want to feel it," he says. "I want to feel you."

Michael wraps an arm around him and, with some effort, sits up. He reaches blindly, clumsily, behind him and feels for the packet of condoms, the tube of lube pressed between the mattress and bed frame. He holds them between them, hesitates, feels the fluttery shake of nerves. 

Alex, on his knees, takes the lube from him, kisses him deeply, slowly - reaches behind himself. The angle is such that it makes it difficult for Michael to see, but he runs idle hands up Alex's back in broad strokes, soothing, petting. Alex's eyes drop closed, his face softens in concentration, his brow furrows, and when, minutes later, Michael replaces Alex's hand with his own, he finds him slick and open. He takes care of the condom on auto-pilot, mind full of static and the hot swell of arousal. 

They move together, and the feel of him, the sight of his face, his mouth dropped open in a gasp, is something Michael prays he will never forget.

And when he moves in Alex something seems to move in him, too; some vital part of him shaking loose, coming unmoored. It's good, _so good_ , this simple connection, this easy press of bodies, but it feels like so much more. As the warm gust of Alex's breath moves past his ear, one thought surfaces through the white haze of pleasure. That it's never felt like this with anyone else. 

He comes, feels the answering call of Alex's body, holds tight as the aftershocks move through them, echo after glorious echo. He shifts them, moves on shaky legs to wet a cloth at the sink, quickly cleans them up. The cold water leaves goosebumps on Alex's skin and he shivers. 

He climbs back in bed, and Alex allows Michael to curl into him, head resting on his chest. He listens to the steady _thump_ of his heart beneath his breastbone and draws idle hands over his belly, his hip. 

They doze, for a time, languorous and sleep-warm, until they can see the sun start to dip on the horizon, and they finally uncoil from one another. 

Alex's kiss, when it comes, lingers for only a moment at the corner of Michael's mouth; presses again, briefly, firmly, like an exclamation point. He touches Michael's jaw, knuckles buffing the scrape of his unshaven cheek, and retreats, sitting up in the narrow bed. He stands, hitches his jeans over his hips, re-fastens them. 

He turns his back, takes a breath so large that Michael can see his ribs expand and contract with it. 

“I have to go,” he says, and picks his shirt and sweatshirt up off the floor, quickly slides into them. “My dad is expecting me back - ” 

Michael can’t help the way his face contorts or the derisive edge to his sigh. Because of course. Of-fucking-course. 

“Yeah, wouldn't want to keep him waiting. You’d better run on home.” He shoves his legs into his jeans, stands to pull them on. 

Alex turns. “Guerin - ”

Michael steps close, close enough to smell the scent of sex still thick on him, and reaches around him to pluck a clean shirt from his pile. Despite the crowding, Alex doesn’t back away.

“I’ve got things to do, so you should probably go.” He puts a hand on the stovetop, leans into it, makes a barrier with his body. “It was nice seeing you.” 

Alex swallows; Michael watches his throat work. He takes another of those expansive breaths.

“I’m being deployed,” he says, and his voice is steady, steadier than it has any business being. 

Michael feels the ground go out from under him. 

“What?” he manages, barely, and his throat is suddenly dry. 

In the gloom of the shuttered trailer Alex’s usually warm eyes look huge and black.

“I ship out the day after tomorrow. Afghanistan. My tour is seven months.” His gaze drops and he fiddles absently with the zipper of his hoodie. “I can’t - I can’t say any mo-”

Michael stops his words with a kiss, can't help it. He wants Alex to stop speaking, to take it back - to tell him a lie, that he's not going, he's _not_. Panic threatens to rise up and choke him.

He puts his lips to the corner of Alex's mouth, his chin, his jaw, rests his forehead against his temple. Alex is _here_ , he came to Michael, wanted to see him and he's _here_ , goddamnit, and that has to count for something. 

Michael kisses him again, slowly, tries to pour into it every ounce of care and affection and worry and _please come back, please please please._

Alex answers in the only way he can, by taking it with him as he goes.

As Michael watches him retreat across the dusty yard, fading sun throwing him into sharp relief, he feels every painful beat of his heart in his throat and wonders if this is what love feels like _._

\------

It ends like this.

For seven months he tracks every source he can find that reports on U.S. military casualties. Every website. Every newspaper. He scours the blogs of several overseas journalists and follows the reports of as many embedded reporters as he can. 

Afghanistan is large and the unending war seems impossibly larger still with the knowledge that Alex is somewhere in it. With every report of an Air Force casualty he keeps himself awake at night imagining the worst. On those nights he drinks himself sick.

It is on one such night that he’s awoken from a whiskey-acetone stupor by an unholy pounding in his head. 

No.

On his _door_.

Someone is hammering on the Airstream’s door. 

It’s pouring rain. He can hear it thundering down on the aluminium roof. It’s a wonder how he even heard the door over the racket it’s making.

He picks his jeans off of the floor and slides into them, not bothering with the button. If old man Foster wants to come to his door in the middle of the night in a rainstorm, he’s not going to get Michael at his best. 

When he pushes the door open it’s to a pitch black night. The ranch is dark and quiet, no light pollution this far from town proper. The wind carries the rain with it and he puts up a hand to block the spray from his face. 

A ghost stands on his doorstep.

Or that’s what his half-drunk mind tells him, at least. He’s dreamed and imagined Alex’s death so many times and in so many ways that it feels more like a memory. The sight of him makes something in Michael’s chest hitch painfully.

The first thing he registers properly is that Alex is in uniform. He’s soaked from the rain, his hair plastered flat to his head, water running down his neck and into his open collar. He blinks up at Michael with dark, haunted eyes. 

Before Michael fully registers he’s going to do it he’s already moving. He seizes the front of Alex’s uniform in one hand and hauls him up the stairs into the Airstream, reaching with his free hand to pull the door closed behind them. 

Over the cacophony of the rain and wind he can only just make out the sound of their exhalations, twin breaths coming quick and strained. He still has a fistfull of Alex’s shirt, the damp fabric heavy in his hand. He tells himself to let go, to back away, to put as much space between them as he can in the cramped caravan, but he can’t seem to make himself release his grip.

Alex makes no move to pull away, either, but instead seems to lean into the weight of Michael’s fist on his chest. His brown eyes are red-rimmed, wide and wild above dark circles set like bruises into his drawn face. Moisture falls from his hair, tracks down his forehead and nose and drips onto Michael’s bare forearm. The cold raises gooseflesh where it lands. 

He looks empty. Hollow and wrung out and exhausted.

A desperate, mad feeling starts to rise in his chest, and Michael searches Alex’s face, looking for a trace of the boy who left him all those months ago in the eyes of the man who stands before him now. What he finds there, or, rather, the lack of what he finds there unnerves him, sets his heartbeat skipping and sailing beneath his breastbone.

He relaxes his grip; moves to let go, to put some space between them because he can’t _breathe_ when he’s this close, but Alex’s hand shoots up, grips his own so tightly Michael can feel his bones grind together. 

It’s the fastest he’s moved so far, and when Michael looks up from their tangled hands Alex’s eyes are sharper, more focused.

He feels when Alex begins to shiver. He’s soaked through to his undershirt and the skin of his hand is icy to the touch. He needs to get him warm.

He untangles their fingers, deliberate and slow, and he can feel Alex resisting, still, until it must become apparent that Michael has no intention of pulling away. Under Alex’s watchful, heavy gaze he moves to unbutton his uniform jacket - sodden, stubborn fabric and one lame hand making him clumsy. He pushes the jacket off of his shoulders and it hits the floor in a wet heap. 

Alex makes no move to aid him, but once freed of the weight of his jacket he shuffles closer, heavy boots dangerously close to Michael’s toes, and puts a shaking hand on his bare chest. 

Michael knows he runs hot, and his relatively elevated body heat means that Alex has always felt comparably cool to him. 

But this…

It’s like being touched by death itself, and he has to consciously combat his own intrusive thoughts as images from his recurring nightmares fight to the forefront of his mind. Alex laying wounded in the sand. Alex with a gaping hole in his chest. Alex blown to pieces. Bleeding out. Dying. Dead. 

And he’s struck with a desperate need to make sure he’s unharmed. He takes the hem of Alex’s sodden shirt and tugs it up, relieved when Alex simply raises his arms to allow it. He’s even more relieved to find his skin is unblemished, as smooth and unmarked as the day he last left Michael’s arms. 

His hands move of their own accord, trailing up his sides, over his chest, around his back, his arms; feeling, tracing, mapping. Each of his biceps has a visible line marking where his undershirt blocked the burn of the harsh middle-eastern sun. They match nearly identical ones on his own arms from hours toiling on the ranch. 

The better part of a year half a world apart and they still bear the same marks. 

Alex blinks those large, empty eyes at him and the weight of it all hits Michael like a lead pipe. He drops his head, buries his face into the crook of Alex’s smooth neck. He smells like damp earth and clean sweat and crisp rainwater and it’s somehow both foreign and familiar at the same time. 

He feels Alex’s fingers in his hair; combing, petting, tugging, and the simple touch is so comforting, so grounding, that, much to his embarrassment, he feels the prick and burn of tears in his eyes. 

He lifts his head, takes Alex’s face in his hands, and kisses him. When it comes down to hands and lips and bare skin it’s almost like nothing has changed. Almost. He still knows Alex’s body, the tight muscles and smooth skin, and knows how to make it sing. He still remembers that his tongue in the hollow behind Alex’s ear makes him weak in the knees. The touch of those large, sure hands still leaves him breathless like no one else’s ever have.

Alex breaks away from his mouth with a ragged little gasp that turns the blood to fire in his veins. He puts a hand to Michael’s stomach and pushes him back, and for a moment Michael thinks he’s done something wrong - drops his head to try and catch his eye. But Alex doesn’t pull away, and instead turns in the circle of his arms, bares to him the long line of his back. 

As invitations go it’s about as clear as either of them are going to manage.

He fumbles with his jeans and impatiently pulls them down; watches as Alex does the same, not bothering to even fully remove his belt, just pulling at the button fly and pushing the pants down his thighs. 

Even the half-step he takes in order to reach the bottle of lube in the drawer is almost too much, he can feel his pulse start to race, and he plasters himself against Alex’s back, aims to chase away the chill. He mouths his nape, the bump of his spine, his ear, sucks a bruise into the curve of his neck and shoulder.

Michael gets two fingers inside him before he feels Alex start to rock back on his hand, impatient jerks of his hips intended to hurry him along. But Michael won’t be rushed. Not now. Not even after seven torturous months of constant worry and paralyzing nightmares and thoroughly unsatisfying bathroom hookups with women whose names he never bothered to learn. He gets a firm hand on his hip and crowds him into the cabinets. 

At three fingers Alex starts making frustrated, pained little sounds, arms braced against the countertop in front of him. Michael absently strokes his hip, his thigh, his stomach. When Alex is open and ready he withdraws his fingers, reaches to fish a condom out of the drawer. He rips the packet open with his teeth, spits the torn corner into the sink. Readies himself.

The first press into him is so sweet it’s almost painful. He’s tight and slick and burning hot inside, and he opens to Michael with hardly more than a shiver of resistance. Still, he takes his time, tries to be gentle with each rock of his hips, with each inch of ground he takes. And take he does. Until he’s flush inside him, around him, surrounding him. 

They move together, out of sync at first but quickly finding their rhythm, that ebb and flow that comes with really good sex.

Alex breathes like he’s been wounded but his hand grasps behind him, clutches at Michael’s thigh, urges more, harder, faster. Breathless little _ah, ah, ah_ ’s fall from his lips in time to the motion of their bodies, and Michael tips his head back to try and kiss the sounds from his open mouth.

Alex finally comes, his whole body seizing, and he throws his head back onto Michael’s shoulder. _Fuck,_ it’s good. He feels it in the rising heat of his blood, in the way his shoulders tighten, how his hands can’t help but clutch at any part of Alex they can reach.

When he comes, panting into Alex’s neck, he squeezes his eyes shut to kaleidoscopic starbursts.

He eases out, takes care of disposing of the condom and taking off his pants, watches as Alex leans against the cabinets catching his breath. He steps close again, nuzzles into his sweaty hair. He reaches to tug Alex’s pants down the rest of the way, wraps his arms around him to lend support to his shaky legs as he steps out of them.

Michael shuffles them to the bunk and maneuvers them down into the sheets. It was never intended for two people, this bunk, and certainly not two grown men, but sharing space with Alex has never been a hardship.

Alex is an exhausted, pliant weight in Michael’s arms. The chilled night air starts to cool his flushed skin and he shivers. Michael uses his foot to pull the blanket from the end of the bunk and drapes it over them; reaches over Alex to tuck it behind his back. 

For a long while he drifts, Alex’s head resting heavy on his chest, the sounds of their even breaths and the rain against the window a soothing backdrop.

He snaps back to awareness when Alex begins to shake. Not from the cold. He’s not shivering, he’s _trembling._ His whole body, pressed along Michael’s side, is held taut, and he can feel the tension as Alex tries in vain to suppress it.

He curls his arm around him, soothes a palm up his back, tries to calm him. He doesn’t know what else to do. He’s afraid to break the delicate silence between them, afraid that Alex will push him away, retreat back into the night, that he’ll wake up to find this was all just another nightmare and Alex is still oceans away. 

He rolls just enough to get both arms around him, twines fingers through his hair, and eases back down, pulling Alex half on top of him. Alex resists only for a moment, stiff and silent in his embrace, before he seems to relent, and relaxes all at once. Still shaking, he buries his face in the crook of Michael’s neck, and for a moment Michael thinks he’s crying, but no sound comes from him, and he feels no moisture against his throat. 

He strokes his hair, smoothes a hand over the knobs of his spine, rubs his hip, hums nonsense into the space between them. All the while Alex shakes apart in his arms, clings to him with unsteady hands, and Michael didn’t know his heart could break any harder. After a long while Alex calms, and whatever moved through him so powerfully dissipates into the night air. 

Michael dozes, stirs, and dozes again, coming awake with each restless twitch of the man laying warm against him. When he wakes to the muted light of morning the bed beside him is empty, the sheets long cold.

And Alex is gone. 

He doesn’t see him again for six years.

\------

It ends like this.

Seeing Alex again was like being kicked square in the solar plexus, and hurt about as much. 

This new Alex has built walls out of discipline. Fortresses out of silence and calculating observation. He’s cutting in a way he never was before. More direct. Sharper, smarter, and yes, more wary. 

But he opens to Michael’s kiss the same way he did when they were just clumsy kids. Wholly, and with abandon. Lips and tongue and biting teeth, fingers in Michael’s hair guiding him just where he wants him, giving as good as he gets.

There’s a sense of calm relief in knowing that Alex still feels this, too. In knowing he wasn’t the only one still hanging onto it a decade past its prime.

After the first breathless fumble, both too far gone for much more than a quick, friction-heavy rut in the unmade sheets, Alex removes his prosthetic with little fanfare. He makes no move to hide or cover what remains of his leg, just sets the pieces aside and looks Michael square in the eye, seemingly unaffected, as though daring him to react.

Michael kisses the corner of his mouth, returns his gaze evenly. If Alex is waiting for a flinch, he isn’t going to find one here. 

He topples Michael back into his bunk and fucks him with the kind of single-minded intensity that drives Michael wild. He kisses him sweetly afterward, like a reward. 

Later, he lets Michael roll him onto his belly and return the favor. 

Naturally, that’s when it all falls apart again.

Alex’s abrupt departure stirs something ugly in him, but a slightly warm beer shared over the Chevy’s open tailgate goes a long way toward softening the blow. Foolishly, he thinks maybe they’ve finally found a rhythm, albeit belatedly and with no shortage of missteps.

He should know by now that hope is a damfool thing to hang his hat on.

A decade later and Jesse Manes still looks at him like he’s roadkill, like he’s so far beneath him as to be invisible. Disgust he could understand. He’s used to that. If he’d directed hatred or resentment or anger at him for daring to put his filthy hands all over his youngest, that’s at least motive he can understand. Bullshit motive, but motive nonetheless. But Manes’ eyes pass over him like he’s nothing. Less than nothing. And it hurts all the more to see Alex kowtow to him - looking to Michael and averting his gaze, staring into the middle distance like the good soldier he is as his father catches his ear. He can’t hear what’s being said, but their body language reads like a looming thunderhead.

Later, when Alex admonishes him for the copper wire, the fucking copper wire of all things, he feels the shadow of Jesse Manes hanging over them.

Six years on and the wound beneath the scar still hurts, pain as bright and fresh as the last time. And the time before that. He wonders, idly, if this will be his life now that Alex is stateside. Caught in his gravity, unable to have him but equally unable to break free. Condemned to a life lived in limbo, forever within reach but maddeningly unable to touch.

He wonders how much acetone it will take to forget this time.

\------

It ends like this.

Closure turns out to be swift and brutal. And if he’d wanted passion, wanted wildfires and fireworks and detonation, just to prove that it was real, that it existed, that it _mattered_ , what he gets instead is an implosion; understated, efficient, and absolutely lethal. Alex looks him up and down and dismisses him with a single sentence. 

The most unkindest cut of all.

The end, when it comes, shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, when has Michael Guerin ever gotten what he wanted?

\-------------------

It ends like this. 

It starts and ends and starts again, only to crash and burn and start the cycle anew. And Michael, minutes and days and years older but no wiser, finds himself each time with less of himself to stitch back together. 

The endless roundabout of hope and disappointment, of one step forward for every two steps back, has become one of the few constants in Michael’s life. 

For ten years it’s been there, hovering at the periphery of his mind. In his best moments he thinks it benign. Painful and ever present, but ultimately a constant he can endure. In his worst he fantasizes about being able to pinpoint the place where Alex lives in him, finding it buried deep below the surface, and excising it, cutting it from its bloody moorings. A temporary agony. A sacrifice of the part to save the whole.

Because this thing with Alex feels like a crash landing every time, yet something he is chronically incapable of avoiding. And isn’t that the very definition of insanity? To do the same thing over and over and somehow still expect a different result? Michael’s most honest truth is that he isn’t strong enough to end it, to fully accept that what’s between them is over - never really even began in the first place. He’s self-aware enough to admit that he probably never will be strong enough.

Kissing DeLuca won’t change that, he knows. Even as he allows himself, in the high of the first absence of physical pain he’s felt in a decade, to indulge in her smile and the sweet taste of her lips he knows that a part of him, maybe the biggest part, will always live in someone else. 

But he doesn’t care.

And he should perhaps feel shame for that. Shame for his disregard and guilt for his selfishness and remorse for his lies of omission.

But he doesn’t. 

He feels wrung out, stripped and weathered and beaten down until he resembles nothing so much as exposed nerve. Raw and overtired, a kind of exhaustion so deep he feels it clean through to his bones. 

He’s been treading water for so long he doesn’t remember what it feels like to float. Maybe he never knew in the first place. And for a hysterical moment he thinks he understands what Max and Isobel must have meant by needing to move forward. To let go of the past and live in the present.

Maybe what he needs is a left turn. 

To DeLuca he’s just Guerin. A guy that can fix a sign, mend a necklace, lend a steady shoulder or be a port in a storm. And for that moment he doesn’t have to be Guerin the fuck-up. Guerin the lost boy. Guerin the unwanted. The left behind. The _alien_. 

Maybe he can allow himself to just be there, just exist without the ever-present ache in his chest reminding him of all the ways he’s failed, or the fact that he’s forever been inadequate in every way that counts.

Maybe he can forget the heartbroken tears on Alex’s face as he’d screamed _I don’t love you_ . The foreign cut of cruelty in that world-ending whimper. The furrow of disappointment between his brows at those spools of copper wire. The crushing reality of _three-quarters of one._ The way his haunted eyes had looked as he’d stood in the rain that long-ago stormy night. His tear-stained face splattered with Michael’s blood.

Maybe he can start to remember what hope feels like when it’s not clouded by pain and bitterness and too many years of endless disappointments.

The feeling the first touch of his fingers to the guitar strings stirs in him is years old and brand new all at once. His hand, newly unbroken, stings and cramps from disuse, but his fingers still remember how to play, and he lets them wander as his mind does the same. He waits for the calm to sweep through him but it doesn’t come. His mind is still too full, his heart yet too empty. 

He keeps circling back to a familiar riff, again and again the same chords, and it takes him a long moment to place it. A dark room on a dark night, deep brown eyes and a guitar between them.

 _Been down one time_ _  
_ _Been down two times  
_ _Never going back again_

He looks up to find Maria watching him. His lips curl into a shaky smile.

_Never going back again…_

That is, of course, when the calm of the bar shatters into ten thousand fragmented images, the world tilting sharply on its axis, pain and remorse and determination and power, _so much power_ and -

And then it’s gone. 

Not faded, not subsided or subdued. Just… gone. And with it, Max. 

_Max._

And when he finally stops screaming his only coherent thought is that nothing will ever be the same. 

\--------------

Maybe it begins like this.

Someone, somewhere is playing the guitar. 

Michael floats, for a time, in and out of consciousness. Wakes. Sleeps. Wakes again. Minutes or hours pass, he doesn’t know. Doesn’t care.

It’s dark. Everything hurts. 

He tries to speak, but the only sound that escapes his throat is a dry groan.

The guitar stops.

He feels cool hands on his face, cradling his head. A glass touches his lips and he drinks greedily, water sloshing down his chin. In the next moment it’s dabbed gently away. Those hands brush the hair back from his face and he feels a damp cloth blot his brow.

He knows those soft, sure hands, would know them anywhere.

He’s here he’s here he’s _here ._

Fingers touch his rough jaw - only for an instant.

“Yeah, I’m here."

He can’t seem to hold his head up. He stops trying. Sleep rises again to take him, and when he goes under it's to the soft sound of those hands on the guitar.

***

He wakes in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. He’s fully dressed beneath a soft sheet and a bi-colored afghan that smells of woodsmoke and aftershave. He’s just this side of too-warm, sweat beading at his temples. He has a vague memory of a damp cloth on his forehead. 

He doesn’t know where he is. He feels panic start to swell in his gut and what made itself known as a prickle behind his eyes is soon a splitting headache that leaves him feeling dizzy and sick. He cranes his neck to assess the room. It has wood walls built like a log cabin. A stone fireplace marks the far wall, glowing red embers buried in its sooty hearth. It’s dark save for a floor lamp in one corner, single bulb glowing dimly. In the pale halo of its light sits a single wooden chair. And Alex. 

He’s asleep sitting up, back straight, a book open on one knee and his chin resting on his chest. There’s a guitar propped against the wall next to him.

The panic recedes and Michael blinks the crust from his eyes, levers himself up. His back pops from disuse and he groans. In an instant Alex is awake and at his side as though he’d always been there. Michael spares a thought to wonder if that’s something they teach in the military.

“How’d I get here?” he croaks. And then, “Also, where the hell is here?”

Evidently assured Michael hasn’t broken himself Alex drags the chair to the side of the bed and resumes his vigil. “You’re at my place,” he says. “It’s…” he squints at his watch, “3:15 in the morning on Saturday the 8th. And you’re here because Maria called me.”

Maria. He remembers… he remembers Noah - trying to take him at gunpoint, make him tell him - he raises a shaky hand, touches his unmarked neck. He escaped. But, no. Max killed him. And then Max… 

He pulls his hand away from his neck, holds it, shaking, in front of his face. His unbroken hand, made whole again. He looks up to find Alex watching him with a peculiar look on his face, one that makes him look years older and painfully young all at once. 

"I - he - " Michael stumbles, thoughts thick on his tongue. There's so much to say but the words won't come. He focuses on following the line of their conversation.

“She called you?” 

“She did. She said you were fine and then you started screaming. You collapsed. You were in and out for a while, I think. She didn’t know what to do. I guess you called for - ” he cuts himself off, gaze skittering askance; seems to spend a long moment collecting his thoughts. “Anyway, she called me. I brought you here.” 

He’s rubbing his bad knee. Michael wonders how long he's been wearing his prosthetic.

"That was this afternoon. Or, yesterday afternoon, technically. You've been asleep since. I didn't know what… I didn't know if something was wrong with you. I had Kyle come and check on you a few hours ago."

"Valenti?"

"Sorry, he's the only alien-friendly doctor I know." He watches Michael's face, must see the way it twists in displeasure. "Don't worry, I was here the whole time. He took some vitals, that's all. He wanted to draw some blood but…"

To this he shakes his head and Michael is so grateful that for a moment he forgets how shitty he feels. Taking his own blood for Liz's experiments was one thing. He could control that. And it was for Isobel, to bring her back, to make sure Max didn't have to sleep next to her pod in that fucking mine for the rest of his - 

Max.

The panic surges again as his patchwork memory supplies the image of Max in that cave next to the faulty pod with Rosa's - no. No, it's not possible. She was _dead_ and he couldn't - could he? After they all discussed it?

"What happened?" he demands, and his voice comes out harsh and slightly hysterical. "Max, is he - ?"

Alex leans forward in the chair, elbows braced on his thighs; rubs a hand over his face. "An hour or so after I got you here Kyle called. Liz had called him...she felt _something_ through some kind of mental bond with Max," the set of his eyebrow says he doesn't fully know what to make of that, but he gamely presses on. "He found Rosa's... body and he… he _resurrected_ her. Liz found them. Rosa, she's okay. She's fine, somehow. Max… Max _isn't_."

He knew it. He knew. He'd felt it happen, but he'd still hoped that somehow he'd gotten it wrong. He feels the hot sting of tears as they well. God, he feels sick. He'd told Max not to do this, he'd _told_ him.

Alex rests a hand on the afghan. Near his leg, but not touching. "Liz called Kyle, he came down. The two of them, and Rosa, I guess - and Isobel, she was there - put him in a pod. Not the same one, I don't think. But it's like stasis, right? At least that's how Kyle described it. Anyway, when he called I had him come and check you over. I talked to Isobel, too. She's okay. Well, not okay. She's pretty shaken, too. But she's not hurt."

Michael pushes himself up, tries to ignore how weak, how lethargic he feels; push through it. "I need to go, I need to - "

"You need to rest." Alex doesn't move to stop him, doesn't have to. As much as it kills him to admit, he doesn't think he could even make it to the door as he is, and Alex knows that. "You won't be any help to anyone, least of all Max, if you can't even stand without help. He's in the pod, he's not going anywhere."

"I should be there," he says, and he tastes the desperation on his tongue.

"And you will be," Alex says, and his gaze is sympathetic but firm. "Isobel is coming to get you in the morning and she'll take you there, or anywhere else you need to go. But it's 3 a.m., Guerin, and you need to rest for now. Everything else can be figured out tomorrow."

He slumps, and what little energy was mustered by the surge of adrenaline fades. Alex's sharp eyes track him, and he edges forward on the chair as though he might reach for him.

"How are you feeling?" he asks. "Kyle said you might need this when you woke up." He leans, reaches to the floor near the head of the bed and retrieves a clear bottle with ACETONE printed on the side in bright red lettering. Michael is reaching for it before Alex has even finished his sentence. Alex unscrews the cap and passes it over, hand hovering in case he drops it.

He takes a few large gulps and nearly groans in relief as the headache begin to ease. "I'm okay," he manages, and feels anything but. But it seems like the sort of thing to say. 

Alex furrows his brow almost endearingly in that way he does. He eyes the bottle, now a good quarter empty. "God, even _knowing…_ seeing it is still so weird." 

He allows Michael a few more mouthfuls before he takes it back, setting it aside. He laughs, an odd thing, utterly devoid of humor. He ducks his head, knuckles his eyes wearily. 

"You know, you really scared me today."

Michael's stomach churns, and it's not from the acetone. He hadn't noticed before, but Alex looks wrecked. Tired, bloodshot eyes and deep dark stains below them, sunken into his cheeks

"First yesterday with the blood - no, don't, I know it was yours." He puts up a hand before Michael can protest. "And then today I get a call from Maria and she's panicked, she thinks you've had some kind of _seizure_ and I don't know what to tell her because I don't know what she knows. Does she know? Did you tell her?"

"No. I mean, no to both. I didn't tell her. I've never told anyone." _Not even you_ sits unspoken between them. 

Alex sighs. "I just, I'm trying to understand. You're at the bar, not drinking, not drunk, just _fine_ , and you suddenly just collapse? You have, what, some kind of alien mind collective with Max and Isobel?"

"No. Sort of. We're connected, the three of us. Max and Isobel more than me." Pain having receded to something manageable, he feels the exhaustion seeping in again. He rubs his eyes. Tries to focus. "It's not all the time. Only when we're hurt or in trouble or need help. My connection is… weaker. Max and Iz can control theirs better. Or, could."

"So you…"

"I _felt_ him die, Alex. I felt it." He touches his chest, rubs a circle over where his heart beats. "Like it was me dying."

" _Christ_." Alex puts his face in his hands, runs his fingers back through his hair, cups the back of his neck. His hair is longer than it was a few weeks ago.

"You know what the worst part is?" Alex says, and he's looking at the floor. He scoffs, a choked, awful little sound. "'Worst', fuck, not even close." He sobers. "You know, I was mad at you. When she called and she told me you were there, all I could think was how _mad_ I was. You told me to come back, I was _waiting_ all morning and you - when she told me something was wrong with you I - I'm _still_ mad and - " he stops, voice wavering dangerously, and wipes a hand over his eyes. 

Michael realizes with a sudden, painful pang that he's trying not to cry.

"Hey, don't," he says. "It's not… you and me, we… everything is always so - and I just need - " He doesn't know how to explain it. What seemed logical only a few hours ago seems almost foolish now, here in the dead of night, and _fuck_ he's so goddamn tired he can hardly think.

Alex takes in Michael's sorry state with red rimmed eyes. "Sorry, you're exhausted. We're both exhausted. We don't have to do this now. Go back to sleep, okay? I can tell you're barely holding your head up."

He clears his throat, rubs a surreptitious hand over his eyes, and sits back in the chair. He picks his book up off the floor again, cracks it open on his lap. 

"I'll be here when you wake up."

Despite the fact that he's in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar bed, it's a bed that he's learning now smells like Alex. Or who Alex has become. And with him here watching over him, standing guard, he realizes he feels entirely safe. And he figures maybe that’s enough for now.

His eyelids grow heavy and when he drifts off it's to the sound of Alex humming quietly, a tune he's never heard before.

\------

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from Dean Lewis’ “Waves”.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAM1wyQJsto)
> 
> [This is the version of “Never Going Back Again” that Michael and Alex are singing.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmC7m34E_3U)
> 
> The timelines of this are pretty fucked, but then again it's Roswell so... yeah the timelines are pretty fucked.
> 
> Feel free to reach out to me on Tumblr [here](https://nielrian.tumblr.com/).


End file.
